The Luckiest Man in America: Film Review

Samir Olivero’s game show dramedy The Luckiest Man in America boasts an excellent, eccentric performance from Paul Walter Hauser but is a mostly insubstantial endeavour.

While Samir Olivero’s game show dramedy, The Luckiest Man in America, follows suit in how it pertains to equating financial aspirations – in the form of prize money – with social freedom, it can’t quite thread the thematic tissue necessary to make the film a substantial endeavour.

In 1984, an ice-cream man (Paul Walter Hauser) from Ohio with a bushy beard and untamed hair auditioned for the CBS game show Press Your Luck. The man introduces himself as Travis Dunne, and we proceed to watch him fluster his way through some one-liners and discuss his wife and child. His working man outlook and oddball eccentricities light up the eyes of producer Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn), who sees hiring Travis as someone the every-man can relate to, even though casting director Chuck (Shamier Anderson) is less enamoured by him.

All is not as it seems, however – a recurring thematic motif for The Luckiest Man in America –  as a knock on the door disturbs the audition to reveal that Travis is not Travis. He is instead a Press Your Luck obsessive named Michael Larson and has conned his way into the audition. Luckily for Michael, Carruthers forgoes this illegal indiscretion because of Michael’s personality and casts him as a contestant in the show, instructing him to return the next day tidied up and in a suit. 

The fun if slight The Luckiest Man in America wastes no time in setting up Michael as disarmingly quirky. He arrives on set in his ice-cream truck, dressed in khaki shorts and an $8 thrift store blazer as one hand anxiously, repeatedly clenches a gripmaster while being escorted around the set via tour guide (Maisie Williams, in a very limited role). Hauser has a real knack for playing these idiosyncratic leading men, his wistful eyes shining with knowledge while his outwardly awkward demeanor is a pacification to the execs and host of the show (Walton Goggins) who just think of him as a weird man from Ohio. It is not a performance pitched in the same mania as Hauser’s work on Richard Jewell, but the bones of this off-kilter performance are spliced similarly. 

This performance is the picture’s best feature, with Hauser achieving a strange unnerving magnetism as Michael Larson. The Luckiest Man in America tracks Michael around his appearance on Press Your Luck, the camera following him through his anxious movements to make a phone call and his time at the game podium.

When not on Michael, the film often cuts to the production hub (a smattering of performers who are outshone at every moment by a producer character played by Shaunette Renée Wilson) as they slowly unravel in response to Michael pressing stop on a digital square that allows him to win money and have another spin on the board. This is no coincidence as Michael has memorised the algorithmic patterns through VHS tape recordings of the show. This story should sound familiar as The Luckiest Man in America is based on the infamous scandal, which began a revolution on the ethics of skill-based game shows versus luck-based game shows on a large scale.  

The ethical conundrum at the centre of this scandal is much more compelling extra-textually. If you are counting cards in Blackjack, you can be ejected from the relevant casino but it is not illegal. Michael Larson was a con artist, known for his various Ponzi schemes, but his actions on Press Your Luck were not illegal, even if CBS attempted to refute his performance on the show as being a form of cheating. This idea of a person playing the game too well against a capitalistic company is commandeered at one point by those in charge at CBS but it is mere window dressing. This is all too common in a script that can only pay lip service; to racial tension, to the American dream, and to the tangle of ethics that this story is rooted in. 

Sadly, nothing is explored in a way that makes The Luckiest Man In America something emotionally or intellectually rewarding. The script, from Olivero and Joyland scribe Maddie Briggs, chooses timidly passive entertainment over something thematically tangible or dramatically compelling, like the film is frightened to take a stance for or against Michael. This could be by design as to incite conversation around the topic, but the script takes too limited a stance on either side to reinforce opinions on either front. This is especially found within the film’s reluctance to explore the inner workings of Michael, prior to going on the show or through any of the fall-out from his appearance. The film’s final shot – before a generic here-is-the-real-person postscript which serves to highlight how uncanny Hauser’s performance truly is – is sadly a little unsatisfying, especially within the emotional spectrum it seems to be aiming towards. 

While the script might flinch at its own concepts, the production design from Lulú Salgado is splendidly realised. The button Michael presses is flimsy plastic to show CBS’s minimal budget and the game show set has these delightful little time capsule idiosyncrasies – a rubix cube is nonchalantly fiddled with by a producer – which are highlighted by the films choices to often switch aspect ratios and by playing with its technical form. The score from John Carrol Kirby, a delightful few numbers of funky, synthesized theremin, also serve to augment the classically 80s retro design of the film.

The technical aspects of The Luckiest Man in America, alongside an amusingly offbeat performance from Hauser, are most of the parts required to make a great film. But as we traverse long enough down this unassuming, breezy 90 minute dramedy, we find it to be quite a timid, meagre offering, one as shallow and as fleeting as an episode of the daytime tv game show that it is set in.

The Luckiest Man in America will be screened at the Glasgow Film Festival on March 3-4, 2025 and will be released in US theaters on April 4, 2025. Read our Glasgow Film Festival reviews and our list of films to watch at the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival!